On and Off the Walls: Suburban Knights

At Powerhouse Arena the other night, a lanky hipster girl in a madras-print dress held hands with a man sporting a medieval-style robe and cap. And as photographer E. F. Kitchen spoke about her new book, “Suburban Knights: A Return to the Middle Ages,” a man clad in full armor wandered around behind her, his suit clanking noisily. When an audience member asked, “What sort of weapons do your subjects use? Does it ever get violent?” this knight, who later introduced himself to me as Zorikh, brandished his four-foot sword. After the laughter subsided, Kitchen handed him her mic. “We don’t hold back,” Zorikh confirmed.

Kitchen, a fine-art photographer based in Venice, California, spent two years photographing the Society for Creative Anachronism, a group devoted to recreating the arts and activities of the Middle Ages. One of their main activities is to engage in combat in large-scale mock wars. But Kitchen’s photographs don’t depict the fighters in battle, she told me, because her antique, large-format 8×10 camera can’t capture movement. “Like my subjects,” she writes in the book, “many of whom make their battle armor by hand over hundreds of hours, I am using an antiquated creative process as an alternative to the high-speed consumption and production of the present.”

Kitchen’s images, which show the knights striking heroic poses in full battle regalia, reminded me of playing dress-up, if only because my view of Kitchen was framed by Power House’s selection of children’s books and a plush, fuzzy stuffed moose. At the same time, the impulse to create a character similar to but greater than oneself seemed inescapably reminiscent of what we do regularly on sites like Facebook and Second Life. “I’ll be honest, I see a lot of people join because their real life sucks,” says an S.C.A. member known as Lord Duncan the Monster. “You can come here and be anybody.” Gazing at Kitchen’s striking portraits, I could relate to the desire to slip into the persona of another more exciting, more courageous character. Her subjects stand in sparse, simple landscapes, but their stances and shields lend them an undeniable air of grandeur.

“Suburban Knights” will be on display at Powerhouse Arena through September 6th. Here’s a selection.